The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) at the University of Chicago seeks a Web Application Developer to lead the design, development, and maintenance of web-based tools and infrastructure supporting ISAC’s digital research initiatives, implementing robust, sustainable, and user-focused web applications and data services for digital scholarship.
Requirements
- Demonstrated fluency in full-stack development, including modern frameworks, backend scripting, and database integration.
- JavaScript (Node, React, Vue) and PHP.
- SQL, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Solr, and ElasticSearch.
- ArcGIS, QGIS, Leaflet, and D3.js.
- REST APIs.
- Docker.
- HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, TEI, and IIIF.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain custom web applications and digital tools that support research workflows and public access to ISAC’s collections and datasets.
- Build user-friendly interfaces for data visualization, geospatial browsing, and interactive storytelling.
- Ensure responsive design, accessibility, and performance across platforms and devices.
- The developer will maintain and improve existing codebases, ensuring scalability and documentation for sustained use.
- Provide technical expertise and hands-on support for ongoing and upcoming digital projects such as the Integrated Database, CAMEL Lab, CRANE, and Diyala Project.
- Collaborate with ISAC researchers to implement technical solutions for digital projects involving text, images, maps, structured data, and emerging AI-supported methods for analysis and discovery.
- Build reproducible, scalable workflows for data transformation, modeling, and long-term archiving.
Other
- Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 2-5 years of work experience in a related job discipline.
- Interest in long-term preservation, open-source tools, and reproducible research.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted indexing, classification, or entity recognition in cultural heritage datasets is a plus.
- Strong collaborative, analytical, organizational, and communication skills.
- Experience with and willingness to explore AI and machine learning frameworks as applied to digital collections and research tools.
